Yerucham, Part 1

SO! I live in Yerucham now. Basically it is a tiny little Podunk (why Microsoft Word just automatically capitalized the word ‘podunk’ for me, I will never know) town in the middle of the Negev desert.

We moved in last Wednesday afternoon, all seven of us girls in a four-room apartment. My room is made up of four girls: Me, Kesha, Misha, and Beth. Beth was in Hagalil before she moved to Chicago. Kesha is from LA, and Misha is from Cherry Hill. A word about these girls: Kesha and Misha are two of my closest friends on Nativ, and both of them are really funny and really great friends to me. That being said, Kesha doesn’t really like to show her feelings, and Misha doesn’t like people to touch her or show her any displays of affection. How I, the world-champion of feelings, hugging, cuddling, and all things touchy-feely, ended up with these friends on Nativ is a mystery to everyone, including the three of us. But we have a really great time together and I’m really happy to be living with them. In the other room is Ashley (one of my best friends from home who lives down the street from me, for those of you who didn’t know), Sarah who is from outside of Philadelphia and is HILARIOUS and always making outrageous statements like “Let’s use all our stipend to build an apartment boat and just not eat anything!” or “Guys we NEED to make an apartment seal!” and Becky, my roommate from first semester who is from Chicago. Overall, our apartment really got what we wanted and we’re all very excited to be living together.

About the actual apartment…well…Toto, we’re not in Jerusalem anymore. It took over a week for our shower to get hot water (we’ve had to shower in the boys apartment) and about four days for them to replace our broken refrigerator (we had to store all our food in our staff’s apartment across the hall). And our toilet leaks water all over the floor from time to time, and when we do shower we will have to shower quickly and then squeegee so that the water doesn’t seep into the hallway. But we unpacked and started organizing quickly. All of our bedrooms are already decorated with tons of pictures, and in my case, cards from Nanny (Ashley wondered aloud today why I have so many pictures of birds and flowers on my wall). Additionally, the bathroom (in our apartment in the middle of the desert, mind you) has a sort of winter-wonderland theme, thanks to Aunt Karen’s many snowflake decorations – sparkly blue ones on the door, cling ones in the shower, and scented holiday candles with snowmen on them. We arranged all the furniture and got organized much faster than any of the other apartments, and it’s even starting to feel like home, despite the fact that the floors are too cold to walk around on barefoot. And our second day here we even went to the hardware store to get some additional shelves, towel hangers, etc etc…which, as our first Yerucham experience, was quite a production. I don’t think the tiny hardware store ever had seven teenage girls in it before, never mind seven who spoke very little Hebrew and wanted to split the bill on seven different credit cards. It ended up in a ride home from one of the non-English-speaking guys who worked in the store, so we wouldn’t have to carry everything. We’re definitely settling into the small town life now.

The first three days were mostly devoted to unpacking and getting organized, with a few introductory meetings with Yoram, who will be our coordinator while we’re here. Last Thursday night was the first night that we really cooked dinner for ourselves and sat down as an apartment to eat together. It was really adorable. Kesha and Misha made delicious stir fry, and there was a huge salad, and we all played grown-ups for a little bit. It’s definitely a huge adjustment to live with six other girls – we have to work out things like groceries, cooking, doing dishes, and learning to clean up after ourselves in an apartment where we’re solely in charge of cleaning. It’s a lot of fun but also a definite challenge, and needless to say I don’t have a ton of space for all my toiletries. Plus all of our clothes live in the hallway, so that’s where all seven of us get dressed – in front of one mirror. Every time I get cranky about this (which is fairly often), I have to remind myself that 1. I signed up for this and 2. it’s all part of the learning and growing experience.

Last Shabbat, our first in Yerucham, was closed, which meant no one was allowed to leave. We all went to services at the synagogue across the street, and then we all went to dinner at our host families’. I was really looking forward to this, because host families were the reason I chose Yerucham over one of the other options on Nativ, volunteering in Be’er-Sheva. My host family consisted of one man named Shlomo. This is where the story gets slightly complicated – Shlomo’s wife and two of his children live in the states, because (I think I’m remembering this right), his wife teaches at University of Washington. His third child, a son age 15, lives with him here but was away this weekend so I didn’t get to meet him. Basically the whole family has been moving back and forth from Israel to the States every few years because they just can’t make up their minds, and so now for work or whatever reason, the family is split across the continents. They do get to visit each other quite frequently though. So my friend Ryan and I were paired with Shlomo as our host family, and he was really great. Although I was sad there weren’t little kids for me to play with like at some of the other host homes, Shlomo was an excellent cook and a really great guy. He’s also in charge of running a discussion group for Nativ on Wednesday nights, so he asked Ryan and I our opinions about what we would like to talk about and how he should go about doing it. He even offered to let us borrow some books from his collection (the Yerucham library is definitely lacking in English books for adults) and even some of his cookbooks. It was overall a really nice night and I hope that Ryan and I will end up spending time with him regularly.

Next blog post: updates on my new jobs. Brace yourselves!